Acquia launches Cloud Site Factory product

This week, Acquia launched a new cloud service it's dubbed Cloud Site Factory to create and manage multiple websites under a single management console.

The service, which they are calling Digital Experience as a Service, essentially enables companies that require many websites to create them in a central place very quickly. One example they give in their statement is a record company creating individual sites for each of the artists on the label where each site has a similar look and feel and content type, but the content is customized for each artist.

Companies with many divisions could use the service to set up landing sites for new products very quickly and the sites would have the unique branding of the company across all the sites, even though the content would be different.

Acquia claims this product can scale to hundreds or even thousands of individual sites all managed in a central console by a single administrator or multiple administrators as needed by each customer.

Acquia CEO Tom Erickson said in a statement that this service is aimed at companies that have to start up web sites on a regular basis and have a hard time maintaining consistency across sites.

"We're knocking down the barriers of cost, procurement, and technical complexity so organizations can grow their capacity to support multiple brands and gain the freedom to disrupt their markets with engaging campaigns," he said.

Since it's based on Drupal, Cloud Site Factory customers also have access to all 20,000 Drupal modules, giving them the ability to add whatever functionality they need to the basic set of Cloud Site Factory services.

The real issue is how companies deal with this tool if they aren't Drupal users already. Will they be able to import existing sites into the Cloud Site Factory infrastructure and how much tweaking will be required regardless of whether they have Drupal sites now or sites built with other tools?

But certainly if a company wanted to start a set of common sites from scratch, this sounds like it could be a reasonable way to do that and continue to scale the sites as more get added.